Saturday, September 1, 2007

Consolation Prize

With Q off at her brother's ersatz wedding party-celebration thingy, I'm at home moping and trying to make the best possible use of my quasi-single time. Naturally, I'm drinking gin and watching movies that my lovely partner would never ever be interested in watching. The first movie I picked I actually discovered on a recent trip to Hollywood to get The Host for movie night. I picked up the case because of the picture. You should know, I'm a sucker for cover art. Knowing this about myself, though, means that I increasingly second guess myself when trying to pick out largely unknown horror flicks. Things in the industry seem to have changed over the last year five years or so. Used to be, you could tell the low budget, super bad movies simply by the title and the cover art. Thanks to increasingly good graphics, this is no longer the case. Good movies are more and more indistinguishable from bad movies. More to the point, though, is the way in which this ups the ante for the would-be horror connoisseur. It gives me genuine pleasure to know about sort of kick ass out of the way horror films. To get there, though, you have to be willing to slog through a lot of simply bad movies. This, I always contend to Q, is what separates the true horror fan from...everyone else. True horror fans are willing to take risks. Willing to sit through over half an hour of bad bad bad story and effects for just a few interesting and unconventional plot twists.

Speaking of, I rented this: The Thirst. Says Netflix "Clean and sober for the first time in years, Lisa (Clare Kramer) and Maxx (Matt Keeslar) are just beginning to get their lives together when they fall under the spell of the seductive Darius (Jeremy Sisto), the leader of a local vampire clan. Lured into his world, the couple soon finds a new addiction -- blood -- in this darkly humorous gore fest co-starring Adam Baldwin and featuring the music of Rasputina, Jack the Mad and more."


Of BtVS fame, Glory joins a band of vampires led by the fucked up brother, Billy, from Six Feet Under. Jayne of Serenity is also a member of this band, though cunningly here named Laine. In a small role is Andrew from BtVS as a petite dominant-in-training. He gets some of the best lines in the film. In my personal favorite, he informs the straightlaced and annoying protagonist that he has to be led through the s&m club on a leash and give him (Andrew) a blow job. All of this plus Rasputina led me to hope for a lot. I'm sorry to add, not so much in the delivery. It's rather shallow. Very derivative. The best and most flattering analogy I can give it is Modern Vampires meets splatter. I had never noticed how much Clare Kramer looks like Mena Suvari until I saw her without those curly golden locks. Trust me, this is the case. Whatever. Attic Expeditions was better.


Next up? Anatomy 2 .

Give me that good good Franka Potente lovin'. Uh huh.

2 comments:

B said...

One of the real tests of horror fandom is slogging through all those Brentwood 4 for 10s. There's this new breed of horror films that go straight from mini-DV film school to Brentwood, and then they combine them with, like, one good Roger Corman flic. We'll alwyas be suckers, but oh well. "They" just don't get it.

Anonymous said...

Egads. Jeremy Sisto must have been wielding his hypnotic powers across the U.S. because I too got sucked in to watching a not-so-good horror flick with him in it this weekend (which somehow isn't surprising since he seems to be in every fricking low-budget horror flick around). He was pretty as always and creepy as always and hot as always but the movie itself sucked ass: Paranoia 1.0. I should've known from the title--anything with computer-related digits in it one should best steer clear of--and yet, he just looked so pretty on the cover, calling me with his siren eyes to watch. Damn him.